perris said:
however in this version, the alien race seeded the planet to evolve human beings...they would have to have a proper knowledge if evolution and that would have to include disease, infection and variables.
One can have some knowledge, but that doesn't mean that everything will occur according to plan, or that a plan as long ranged as aeons could necessarily, and unmistakeably be worked out.
With all our knowledge in meteorology we can't predict the weather with a great deal of accuracy beyond a few days or a week. What this amounts to is that with some certainty we can give a fairly good account for what the weather might be tomarrow afternoon. But move too far into the future, and the predictions can go to pot.
Much like the weather, evolutions on a planet would not fit in line with a carefully controlled experiment (such as in the lab) where everything can be locked down, only 1 variable can be isolated, and one could predict from one given unknown (aka what DNA sequence they would have seeded the planet with) exactly what would happen.
Go away for many aeons, don't continue to exert certain control over the system, and things won't necessarily fit a given pre-conceived plan. If we were to begin terraforming Mars for instance, seeded the planet with soem microbes (forgetting for a moment questions of whether there is microscopic life present in some places on Mars already), were to then leave the planet for a billion years or something. Our descendents shouldn't be surprised if the end results weren't exactly what we predicted.
The problem would be too many unknowns, and a system (which we would have for all intents and purposes abandoned) after giving it some initial DNA/organisms. What we could not necessarily say is:
- How exactly that DNA will mutate, and how these mutations will effect future evolution on the given planet.
- What climatic changes will necessarily occur (especially if it were a young world in a currently developing solar system), and how these will change conditions for the evolving species.
- What extraterrestrial events (baring our own) would necessarily hit it...aka asteroid strikes, possibility for mass level extinctions.
- How exactly the forming life will react to those specific conditions (which might not be entirely predictable to begin with).
Given this, and given that a planet and a given biosphere is hardly a clinical environment that could be kept under tight control (such as in an experiment), especially by aliens who didn't stick around to "influence things" when something got off course; I just don't see it as a reasonable expectation to think they could micromanage exactly what would result.
An initial organism or bit of DNA is just that. But considering evolution, it isn't an unchanging constant...
